Judith M. Bennett

C. Warren Hollister

Marked by C. Warren Hollister's clear historical vision and engaging teaching style, this classic text has been judiciously revised by Judith Bennett; the tenth edition includes greater coverage of Byzantium and Islam, a revised map program, a new essay program on medieval myths, and more. In his preface to the eighth edition, Professor Hollister wrote of his realization, while in college, that our world today "is a product of the medieval past." Medieval Europe introduces today's students to the medieval roots of our own society.

Medieval Europe: A Short History

John R Hubbard Professor of History Judith M Bennett

Written for everyone interested in women's and gender history, History Matters reaffirms the importance to feminist theory and activism of long-term historical perspectives. Judith M. Bennett, who has been commenting on developments in women's and gender history since the 1980s, argues that the achievement of a more feminist future relies on a rich, plausible, and well-informed knowledge of the past, and she asks her readers to consider what sorts of feminist history can best advance the struggles of the twenty-first century. Bennett takes as her central problem the growing chasm between feminism and history. Closely allied in the 1970s, each has now moved away from the other. Seeking to narrow this gap, Bennett proposes that feminist historians turn their attention to the intellectual challenges posed by the persistence of patriarchy. She posits a "patriarchal equilibrium" whereby, despite many changes in women's experiences over past centuries, women's status vis-à-vis that of men has remained remarkably unchanged. Although, for example, women today find employment in occupations unimaginable to medieval women, medieval and modern women have both encountered the same wage gap, earning on average only three-fourths of the wages earned by men. Bennett argues that the theoretical challenge posed by this patriarchal equilibrium will be best met by long-term historical perspectives that reach back well before the modern era. In chapters focused on women's work and lesbian sexuality, Bennett demonstrates the contemporary relevance of the distant past to feminist theory and politics. She concludes with a chapter that adds a new twist—the challenges of textbooks and classrooms—to viewing women's history from a distance and with feminist intent. A new manifesto, History Matters engages forthrightly with the challenges faced by feminist historians today. It argues for the radical potential of a history that is focused on feminist issues, aware of the distant past, attentive to continuities over time, and alert to the workings of patriarchal power.

Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism

History Matters

Bennett examines the gradual decline of a female brewing tradition in England from 1300-1600, shedding new light on women's work and patriarchal social arrangements during a time of dramatic economic change.

Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600

Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England

Women brewed and sold most of the ale drunk in medieval England, but after 1350, men slowly took over the trade. By 1600, most brewers in London - as well as in many towns and villages - were male, not female. Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England investigates this transition, asking how, when, and why brewing ceased to be a women's trade and became a trade of men. Drawing on a wide variety of sources - such as literary and artistic materials, court records, accounts, and administrative orders - Judith Bennett vividly describes how brewsters (that is, female brewers) slowly left the trade. She tells a story of commercial growth, gild formation, changing technologies, innovative regulations, and finally, enduring ideas that linked brewsters with drunkenness and disorder. Examining this instance of seemingly dramatic change in women's status, Bennett argues that it included significant elements of continuity. Women might not have brewed in 1600 as often as they had in 1300, but they still worked predominantly in low-status, low-skilled, and poorly remunerated tasks. Using the experiences of brewsters to rewrite the history of women's work during the rise of capitalism, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England offers a telling story of the endurance of patriarchy in a time of dramatic economic change.

A Medieval Life offers a biography of one woman, a portrait of her world, and an introduction to historical method. A Medieval Life offers a biography of one woman, a portrait of her world, and an introduction to historical method. Written in a clear and accessible style, it reworks a well-loved book to provide an entirely new resource for students, teachers, and general readers. Like Cecilia Penifader, most people in the Middle Ages were peasants, humble people living socially below the knights, bishops, and kings who figure so large in history books. Judith M. Bennett shows that peasants, too, made history. She explores how peasant lives were closely entangled with the lives and interests of those more privileged, looking at manors as well as villages; parishes, faith, and ritual practices; royal taxes and justice; economy and trade; famine and disease. By moving out from Cecilia's perspective, the book explores the ties and tensions that bound all medieval people—poor as well as rich—into a medieval society. The book also provides a primer on the fact-finding and interpretative debates that are at the heart of the historian's craft. Each chapter includes a new section on how medievalists today are studying such topics as puberty, morals, courtship, and climate change. The illustrations, taken from the famous Luttrell Psalter, provide a coherent, rich, and interpretatively complex visual program. And the final chapter explores some of the different ways in which historians, for better and for worse, have understood medieval society.

Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants Before the Plague

A Medieval Life

Elizabeth A. Clark

Jean F. O'Barr

Judith Mackenzie Bennett

B. Anne Vilen

Sarah Westphal-Wihl

Focusing on medieval women with a wide range of occupations and life-styles, the interdisciplinary essays in this collection examine women's activities within the patriarchal structures of the time. Individual essays explore women's challenges to a sexual ideology that confined them strictly to the roles of wives, mothers, and servants. Also included are sections on women and work, cultural production and literacy, and religious life. These essays provide a greater understanding of the ways in which gender has played a part in determining relations of power in Western cultures. This volume makes a vital contribution to the current scholarship about women in the Middle Ages.

Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages

Unlike most histories of European women, which have typically focused on the 19th and 20th century elite, this study reconstructs the public lives of peasant women and men during the six decades before the Black Death of 1348-49. Drawing on the extensive records of the forest manor of Brigstock, Judith Bennett challenges the myth of a "golden age" of equality for medieval men and women. Instead, she ably shows that women faced profound political, legal, economic, and social disadvantages in their dealings with men. These disadvantages stemmed more from women's household status as dependents of their husbands than from any notion of female inferiority; consequently, adolescents and widows participated much more actively than wives in the public life of Brigstock. Women in the Medieval English Countryside demonstrates not only how enduring the subordination of women has been throughout English history, but also how firmly that subordination has been rooted in the conjugal household.

Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague

Women in the Medieval English Countryside

Ruth Mazo Karras

The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe provides a comprehensive overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E. It contains material from some of the foremost scholars in this field, and will not only serve as the major reference text in the area of medieval and gender studies, but will also provide the agenda for future new research.

Judith M. Bennett

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